The coded message from Marcus arrived in Rome like a thunderbolt, delivered to Perennis by a relay of exhausted riders who had nearly killed their horses in their haste. Alex convened his council in the dead of night. The news that their agent had been compromised and that the entire shadow war now hinged on an impossible demand threw the room into a state of crisis.
"We must pull him out," Maximus said immediately, his military instincts taking over. His voice was a low, hard growl. "The mission is compromised. The agent's life is at risk. We can send a fast cavalry detachment to the border to create a diversion, draw the Parthian patrols east, and give him a window to escape across the Euphrates."
Perennis, whose agent was the one in danger, vehemently disagreed. "To extract him now would be to admit defeat!" he hissed, his face pale with anxiety. "It would show Osroes that we are weak, that we are afraid of the King's Guard. He will never trust us again. All the work, all the risk… it will be for nothing. We must double down. We must find a way to give him what he wants."
"Give him what he wants?" Rufus countered, his voice aghast. "He wants a 'demonstration of Roman power'! What does that mean, Prefect? Do you suggest we march a legion to the gates of Ctesiphon to impress a would-be usurper? That is not a demonstration; that is an act of war!"
The council was at an impasse, trapped between a prudent retreat and a suicidal escalation. But as Alex listened to them argue, he felt a strange sense of calm. The crisis had presented him not with a problem, but with an opportunity. Osroes wanted a demonstration. He would get one. A demonstration so strange, so terrifying, and so seemingly impossible that it would look like the wrath of the gods themselves.
"He is right," Alex said, his quiet voice cutting through the arguments. All eyes turned to him. "Osroes needs a sign to convince the other nobles to join him. A sign that the gods favor his cause. We will give him one." He turned to the laptop on his desk, its screen glowing with a cool, blue light.
"Lyra," he said softly. "I need a weapon. A surgical tool. Something that can be created with locally available resources by a single agent, deep in enemy territory. It must cause spectacular, undeniable destruction to a specific target, but in a way that leaves no trace of a Roman military presence."
Processing request, Lyra's voice replied. Analyzing available chemical precursors and resources in the Mesopotamian region. Accessing historical and geological data. The screen filled with chemical formulas and regional maps highlighting natural resource deposits. The optimal solution is a refined incendiary weapon, an evolution of the primitive compounds known to your Greek scholars. The primary component will be crude oil, or naphtha, which is abundant in natural surface seeps in the region east of the Tigris. This will be combined with powdered sulfur and quicklime, both readily available in any major Parthian marketplace for use in alchemy and construction.
"And what does it do?" Alex asked.
When mixed, these components create a volatile, viscous liquid, Lyra explained. The quicklime will react violently with any moisture present in the target, generating intense heat. This heat will ignite the naphtha-sulfur mixture, creating a self-igniting, self-oxidizing incendiary that cannot be extinguished by water. In fact, the application of water will only accelerate the chemical reaction, making the fire hotter and more violent. It is a weapon of terror as much as destruction.
It was perfect. A fire that fed on water. A tool of divine, inexplicable punishment.
Alex then chose the target. It could not be a military fortress; attacking one would be an unambiguous act of war. It had to be something symbolic, something that would hurt King Vologases personally and politically.
"Lyra, locate the Royal Granary of Ctesiphon," he commanded.
A map of the city appeared, highlighting a massive complex near the royal palace. The Great Granary of Vologases IV, Lyra identified. A supposedly fireproof structure of brick and clay, where the grain tax collected from the surrounding provinces is stored. My intelligence analysis indicates the grain from Satrap Osroes's province of Media was recently delivered and is stored in the northern wing.
The target was chosen. To destroy it would be a huge economic blow to the king, and it would look to all the world like the gods themselves were specifically striking at the king's wealth, burning the tribute taken from the very man who was about to rebel.
A new, coded message was dispatched to Marcus in Ctesiphon. It did not contain complex plans, only a simple alchemical formula and a designated target.
Deep in the sprawling Parthian capital, Marcus received the message. He understood at once. He spent the next two days like a ghost, haunting the city's bazaars. Posing as a physician's assistant, he bought a large quantity of sulfur. As a builder's foreman, he acquired bags of powdered quicklime. And under the cover of night, he traveled to a foul-smelling seep outside the city walls, a place local legend claimed was a gateway to the underworld, and filled several waterskins with thick, black naphtha.
On the third night, a moonless, starless black, he made his move. He approached the Great Granary complex, a monolithic structure surrounded by high walls and patrolled by the King's Guard. He did not try to fight his way in. He used the skills he had learned as a scout in the forests of Germania, scaling a forgotten section of the wall and moving across the rooftops like a phantom.
He reached the roof of the northern wing, the section holding Osroes's grain. Below him, he could hear the guards making their rounds. He worked quickly and silently, mixing the foul-smelling components in a leather bucket. He located the large terracotta ventilation shafts that led down into the heart of the grain silos. Holding his breath against the volatile fumes, he poured the thick, black liquid down into the darkness, into the dry, waiting heart of a million bushels of wheat.
He was gone before the first wisp of smoke appeared.
The reaction began slowly at first, a deep, internal heating as the quicklime reacted with the faint moisture in the air. Then, smoke, thick and acrid, began to pour from the ventilation shafts. The guards raised the alarm, thinking it was a simple fire. They did what any sensible person would do. They began throwing buckets of water down the shafts.
The result was an explosion. The water hit the quicklime, causing a violent, instantaneous flash of heat that ignited the naphtha-sulfur mixture in a colossal fireball. The roof of the granary erupted upwards, and a pillar of roaring, unholy fire lit up the entire city. The fire was a demonic, living thing. It was orange and black and seemed to burn with a heat that melted the very bricks of the supposedly fireproof structure. The guards' frantic, continued efforts to douse it with water only made it burn hotter, angrier, a fact that spread terror and religious awe through the watching populace.
The Royal Granary of Ctesiphon, the symbol of the king's wealth and power, was utterly destroyed, collapsing into a smoking, molten ruin.
The next day, the city was in chaos. The people whispered that the gods were angry with Vologases, that they had sent a fire from heaven that fed on water to punish him for his weakness. Satrap Osroes, witnessing this "divine miracle" from his own villa, was now a true believer. He understood that his new Roman allies wielded a power that went beyond swords and gold. They could call down fire from heaven. His hesitation vanished, replaced by a zealous certainty. He sent a simple, unsigned message to the tavern where he knew the "glass merchant" received his communications. It contained only three words: "I accept. The rebellion begins."
Back in Rome, Alex received the news of the successful operation. His gambit had worked. He had his rebel king. He had lit the fuse on a Parthian civil war without a single Roman soldier crossing the border. He stood before the map of the East, a sense of cold, terrifying power settling over him.
As he was contemplating his next move, Sabina was shown into his study. She looked shaken, her usual confident poise replaced by a look of profound bewilderment.
"Caesar," she said, her voice unsteady. "The port expansion at Ostia… my engineers, in their dredging operations… they have uncovered something. Something ancient, buried deep in the mud of the harbor." She unrolled a sea-chart on his desk. "It is a submerged breakwater, far older and more advanced than any known Roman construction. But it's what they found inside it that is… impossible."
She reached into a leather bag and placed a small, heavy object on his desk. It was a piece of metal, roughly the size of his fist. It was dark and strangely light, its surface pitted with what must have been millennia of undersea corrosion, but it was completely, utterly free of rust.
Alex picked it up. The feel of it—the weight, the texture, the temperature—was unnervingly familiar. His gaze shot to the laptop on his desk. The metal was the exact same color and composition as its casing.
"The engineers say the alloy is unknown to them," Sabina whispered, her eyes wide. "It is not bronze, not iron, not electrum. It is nothing they have ever seen before."
Alex stared at the piece of impossible, 21st-century technology, a fragment of a machine identical to his own, that had been sitting at the bottom of his harbor for what must have been thousands of years. The world tilted on its axis. He was not the first.